Sonali Kolhatkar: Abolishing the Nation’s Largest Jail System
L.A. County activists are working to replace violent jails with mental health facilities, and to reallocate funding from incarceration toward social services.
Michael Simms: God, Poetry and Trauma
In the 19th century, if you asked a scientist whether he believed in God, he would have answered, ‘Of course, I don’t believe in God, I’m a scientist.” But if you ask a scientist today whether he believes in God, he would answer, “Of course, I believe in God, I’m a scientist.”
John Clare: The Instinct of Hope
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Patricia A. Nugent: Father with a Gun
Years working in human resources convinced me that no school employee should have a gun. Period.
Wendy Mnookin: In the Small Rotary
where Route 100 meets School Street,
two cows graze.
Joseph E Davis: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’ — it’s people in distress
The idea that one’s distress is primarily caused by a neurochemical deficiency that can be corrected by a drug is a fiction. The idea that it explains first-person experience or that it offers some exemption from responsibility is a fiction as well.
Stephen Dobyns: Leaf Blowers
That autumn morning he awoke to the crying
of lost souls that quickly changed to the roar
of leaf blowers up and down the street
Liz Moran: (Harper’s Bazaar)
I watched her for ten long minutes
in Barnes & Noble.
Michelle Bitting: Walls
Worst I had to deal with, well, I suppose that time my son was shut in a padded room and shit himself at the special needs school. He was 13 and having one helluva wiring crisis. I got called to come get him after he graffitied his feces across white walls.
Elena Karina Byrne: Reality may still be unacceptable Gerhard Richter
A Repeating Dream I’m Belly-Down at Eleven
beneath barbwire like bedsprings during night-climbs
Jon Queally: Just Hours After Anti-Semitic Remarks, Trump Promotes Himself as ‘King of Israel… Second Coming of God’
“The President is a raving lunatic,” responded Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum. “He is not well.”
Leslie McGrath: Litany
Each day’s a train bound for Calgary, St. Paul, Santa Fe, its flickering windows a foreign film. The doors will never open. But the tracks will beckon. You’ll lay your … Continue reading
Leslie McGrath: Her Dementia
I walk the earth and have forgotten
which memory’s mine and which is not
and who was she I used to be.
Vox Populi 